#2958: Bob Hall

Dingbat morons in state legislatures is nothing new, and Texas has been riddled with them for a long time; these days, however, state legislative dingbattery seems to be a potential pathway to the national political scene. Now, we don’t really think Robert Lee Hall III, a feeble Tea Party candidate who has been serving in the Texas state legislature since 2015, is in any way bound for Washington, but his ideas have travelled. Bob Hall is primarily associated with promotion of misinformation and debunked conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, including pushing the nonsense idea that COVID-19 vaccines skipped animal testing, and encouraging people to forego the vaccine. Instead of protecting yourself by taking the vaccine, Hall predictably recommended worthless bullshit such as hydroxychloroquine.

 

Indeed, Hall – who of course has no medical background – introduced a proposal to ban any entity, public or private, from requiring vaccination of their employees (the proposal would prohibit “discrimination” based on a person’s vaccine choices). According to Hall, and completely contrary to reality, “the mere fact that a person has not received a specific vaccine does not make them a threat to others’ health and safety”; moreover, “in contrast, vaccines they have elected not to have may very well be a threat to their own health and safety” – as Hall, like many other anti-vaccine activists saw it, because he and they are confused morons, the COVID vaccines were “experimental” treatments. Hall supported his proposal with testimonies from people like legendary pseudoscientist and quack Ben Edwards.

 

But Hall was antivaccine before COVID, too. In 2019, for instance, Hall sponsored Texas Senate Bill 2350 (SB2350), which sought to prohibit the administration of vaccines that did not meet criteria Hall had copypasted from various anti-vaccine websites; the bill tried for instance to tell the FDA what criteria they should use for approving new vaccines, it perpetuated standard antivaccine falsehoods about vaccines potentially causing cancer and infertility, and it tried to parrot false antivaccine myths to the effect that vaccines aren’t sufficiently tested for safety. The bill died in committee, but only after it had been widely championed by various anti-vaccine groups in Texas and beyond.

 

Part of the popularity of Hall’s efforts among Texan antivaccine activists was due to the (alleged) fact that it was (purportedly) “rejecting the federal narrative” (Davis Taylor of the conspiracy theory hub Tenth Amendment Center). And indeed, Hall is very much worried about federal narratives and federal other things: in response to the disastrous winter storm that left millions of Texans without power or water for days in 2021, for instance, Hall was quick to declare that “the absolute worst [mistake] that we could make would be to join in with the national grid. That would put us back underneath federal control. And the last thing we need is additional federal government messing with Texas.”

 

In 2021, he tried again, with a bill that “would require physicians to disclose the excipients contained in a vaccine” in order to scare as many as possible from getting the vaccine by the familiar antivaccine gambit of listing alien-sounding chemicals (the bill would not require physicians to mention risks associated with foregoing vaccines). Among the ingredients Hall mistakenly believes vaccines contain are, in addition to aluminum and MSG, “fetal parts […] that people for religious reasons might not want to take that vaccine”. According to Hall, the motivation for the bill was “just a matter of making an informed consent knowing what is being done to them”; Hall is apparently so practised at anti-vaccine talking point parroting that he can’t even construct meaningful sentences, but he does, strikingly and unintentionally, reveal a bit about what these kinds of people mean by 'informed' (it’s not informed). In his presentation of the bill, Hall notoriously also kept repeating the myth that vaccine manufacturers have no liability; based on that piece of misinformation, the extra level of ‘informed consent’ is needed because “we are doing something so dangerous that the federal government has put up a barrier relieving the pharmaceuticals and doctors of any responsibility for any adverse affect [sic].”

 

For his efforts on behalf of wingnuttery and conspiracy theories, Hall was invited to speak at Michael Flynn & Clay Clark’s Reawaken America Tour. Hall was also a speaker at Richard Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s training event for Texas law enforcement officials in Houston in February 2021.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat moron with little or no grasp of what goes on in reality, but with strong feelings about it based on paranoia, fanaticism and conspiracy theories. Still very dangerous, though.